


Out of Freedom

by The_Exile



Series: Tales of Uniques [3]
Category: Xenoblade Chronicles
Genre: Dragons, Gen, Minor Spoilers, Origin Story, Religion, Speculation, references to Xenogears and Xenosaga
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-16 00:48:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3468149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A backstory for Avalanche Abaasy, first and most powerful of the Elder Sages of the Order of Uniques. Final Marcus asks him about his past, so Abaasy tells him a little about his life among other Dragons, how and why he came to the Bionis from his home dimension and, most importantly, why he doesn't like being worshipped as a deity. There are some things he doesn't wish to talk about, most of them to do with his plans for the future. </p><p>Originally for DragonBB2015</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of Freedom

Final Marcus had not been prepared to suddenly discover Avalanche Abaasy hovering directly behind him. Suspended several thousand feet above the sheer cliff face that surrounded the jagged, winding spire of Three Sage Peak, the summit of Valak Mountain, his powerful wings, scaled with a spike at each digit but otherwise bat-like in appearance, making no sound as their rhythmic beat kept him aloft. The dragon's size and majestic presence gave the appearance that he completely engulfed the sky. Had Marcus even wanted to see what lay behind Abaasy's dark-scaled form, those fiery eyes boring into him demanded immediate attention. An encounter with Avalanche Abaasy was nerve-wracking even when he had been forewarned - centuries of experience as High Sage, steward and master of ceremonies for the Order of Uniques did not accustom him to the sight of the Order's founder, a being who seemed to exist in a realm above and beyond even a society dedicated to those individuals who have proven the right to stand apart.

Not wishing to show weakness in front of the dragon even though it was almost certainly ultimately futile - he strongly suspected the Abyssal One could read his thoughts - Marcus picked up a cloth and began polishing the inscription on the menhir near his cave shrine entrance, trying to look busy but not rushed, certainly not too busy that he couldn't be interrupted by a sudden visit from a dragon. He prevented himself from thinking the word 'casual'. The Abyss Dragon did not make casual visits. His appearance itself was an omen of momentous times ahead, for better or worse.

"I apologise for not preparing for your arrival, Abyssal One, I never received the summons or saw the portents..."

"I was not summoned. I do not require summoning to go where I will in this plane," Abaasy's voice directly entered Marcus' mind, echoing through the chambers of his inner world as though every shadow in the dark corners spoke at once. His voice was a long, low, yawning sound with a hint of casual, graceful lethality that seemed almost feline, "Nor do portents always precede my arrival. I do not cause avalanches or thunderstorms to appear, nor are they required, nor was I born from them, nor do I live inside one... I could list all the myths and legends surrounding my name that seemed to be shared by fresh initiates and Elder Sages alike but I assure you they are all false."

Marcus wondered if that was supposed to be an attempt at humour. He didn't think Abaasy told jokes. He wasn't even sure if he was allowed to think such a thing, or if it would result in fire being breathed on him. Abaasy wasn't one for petty vindictive punishments either, he simply ignored almost all business that was not an immediate threat of global extinction, but the dragon was already acting differently to normal and nobody really knew what Abaasy was thinking.

"I do choose to channel enough power with the exact requisite lack of subtlety that my aura creates minor natural disasters in my immediate environment," the dragon went on after a pause, during which he never blinked and shifted his eyes only once, to look at something Marcus knew probably didn't exist in any visible spectrum, or even dimension of reality, that a mortal could see, "I find this a useful tool to inspire awe during ceremonies, or to inspire fear in my enemies. I have long ago mastered the art of dampening my aura where the noise and structural damage would be inconvenient."

"I apologise for the offense that my assumption may have caused," replied Marcus. 

"No offence was taken, my feelings are not so easy to hurt, although you are correct in observing that this conversation was intended, and that I am here to teach a lesson," said the dragon, "And to make a request that you change your behaviour towards me. I would like you to cease referring to me as a deity during ceremonies, or implying that I am such a thing by your use of language."

"My use of such terminology was only to inspire the same awe that you expressed a desire for," explained Marcus, "I am aware that you do not consider yourself a deity."

"I am not a deity, Final Marcus, it is not a matter of personal preference," responded Abaasy, "There is a difference between the correct amount of respect for an entity that is far, far more powerful than yourself, and the specific act of worshipping a deity. The mood of wonder and anticipation, the sense of unity and the heightened level of spiritual receptiveness necessary for a grand ritual, they are very different from a mass prayer to a deity."

"Why does it matter so much? I always believed it was a convenient illusion, like their belief that you only appear during storms."

"I did not wish you to believe that I *only* appear during storms, and neither do I wish you to believe that I am in any way a deity, willing or otherwise. As I said, it makes a great deal of difference. The act of worshipping a deity leads to some very specific behaviour that the act of acknowledging the existence of something more powerful than yourself, no matter how great the power difference, does not. It is the possibility of such behaviour that concerns me. It has caused problems in the past, not only for myself but for my race, and I believe it will continue to cause the same problems or worse."

"Your past. Permit my presumptuousness but... you never speak of your past."

"There is little reason to speak of it. I allow my past to shape my decisions - the governing of the Order of Uniques included - but the process has never yet required me to speak of it, any more than I am required to disclose the full internal workings of the Order or all my plans for the future. However, it has now become necessary to speak of of it, if I wish to avert the disaster I am fairly sure is coming, so I shall," said Abaasy, choosing this moment to alight on the platform and perch on a boulder, his wickedly spiked tail wrapped around for additional balance. Marcus took this as an indication that it would take a long time, so he put down his cloth and found himself a slightly smaller, if still twice the size that would a comfortable seat for a Homs, boulder to sit on.

"The order in which I tell the tale may not make sense at first but its purpose shall become apparent in time. It remains true that I do nothing without purpose. I shall start with the origin of my name."

* * *

"You are probably the only Unique, even among the Sages, to know that I was not Named in an initiation ceremony. My name was given to me long before the Order even existed, when I was a young dragon still training at the Academy," explained Abaasy. Marcus could not imagine a young Avalanche Abaasy. He could not conceive of this unfathomably powerful being, whose ether signature was heavily shielded and only brushed against this world, yet still gave the giant a migraine to stare at for too long, ever needed to sit and learn at an academy, a student still clueless about the world. He supposed that he had to think about his revered leader as a mortal who had been young, who would grow old and die, if he was to avoid offending him by mistaking him for a God, "I was named by my roost, which is a wider social community rather like an extended family. The ceremony is similar. In fact, I based the process of Naming a Unique on my own racial customs. My birth name is Abaasy, a word that refers to the colour, shape and hardness of my scales. Avalanche was the name that marks me as different from those around me. However, you have to understand that 'Avalanche' is only a rough translation of the exact concept. Unique names on the Bionis are designed to be very literal, to help make it apparent at first glance what it is that makes an individual so Unique. Draconic language is telepathically broadcasted. Words do not have just one meaning, and often are not transmitted as single words at once, but as several words that are referenced back to words that are connected to them. Avalanche is only a place marker for my full Unique name."

That explains a lot, thought Final Marcus, whose name was 'Final' not only because he was one of the last living members of the Slobos clan of giants, but only because his role within the clan was that of 'Final Guardian', the protector of his people's greatest treasures and mysteries, who was duty-bound to stay alive even when he was truly the last of his race, as well as present himself as the paragon of his civilisation at all times. He had never quite understood why Abaasy, who had so many greater things to associate himself with, chose avalanches, of all things. Avalanches weren't even the most common natural disaster he caused. Part of the reason Marcus gave his leader so many elaborate titles when introducing the dragon before a ceremony, was in the vain hope that Abaasy would adopt one of them. Now he understood that such an assumption, too, had been foolish and possibly insulting. He fought back a humiliation that bordered upon panic at the possibility that the dragon had actually bothered noticing.

“My full name has to do with the way that magic, the manipulation of Ether, works, and specifically the way that the flame of an individual's spirit can become an inferno, its wind can become a tornado, the darkness of its shadow a black hole that consumes all light and life. Dragons visualise the spirit as something fundamental and unformed that flows freely through the physical world, manipulating all matter that the will exerts its power over. It is an easy way to visualise the existence of something in a higher dimension that acts upon the lower, something that does not have a physical form to imagine, to compare it to a force of nature. However, such a force also acts on its own, as does anything free, and the effect on the lesser dimensions of even a slight shift in the higher dimensions cannot always be measured. When an individual achieves power beyond a certain limit, they begin to affect the world simply by existing within it. Even though the individual does not necessarily mean to be destructive, the change in the amount of energy and its direction can cause random and often extreme repercussions that can be catastrophic. This name was given to me as a warning that, with the way my powers were developing, it would soon happen to me.”

“You were powerful among your own race?”

“Of course. A true Unique is not simply a novelty, they cannot earn their Name simply by being of a powerful or rare species. If you were simply the only Slobos, rather than an exceptional Slobos, I would have simply accepted that there were no Unique Sloboses.”

Marcus wasn't sure whether to take this as a reprimand or a compliment, or whether it was supposed to at all reveal Abaasy's opinion of the Slobos tribe, “I apologise. I simply remembered you telling me that the dragons are far more powerful than any race in this world.”

“Indeed, we are. A dragon is native to a dimension higher than this physical realm, the realm in which Ether is the dominant substance. We have a permanent immaterial existence. We are not the highest, however; there are some who have no physical existence at all and can manipulate matter at will, without even expending energy, or at least having unlimited reserves of that energy to expend. Occasionally we communicate with these beings but we cannot leave our physical bodies behind. We can, however, travel between realms at will, allowing us to travel the great distances between worlds in your dimension, or observe them on a higher plane for longer periods of time than you can conceive of. It was the travel to new worlds, the making of portals, that I specialised in, once I graduated from my elementary studies. I was a gifted student with prodigious amounts of raw Ether energy – this is not necessarily the same as actual magical talent but in my case, I possessed the discipline to control the vast energy levels I could summon. I was curious about the wider Universe around me and enjoyed focusing my talent on creating ever more ambitious portals, to longer distances, more obscure places, often unstable, hostile or simply too different for a dragon to mentally adjust to.”

“And that was how you found our world?”

“By that time, I was not opening portals simply out of academic curiosity or a need for recognition by my peers. As I said, there were certain events in the history of our race that swiftly became crises. It was about the time of my graduation from the academy and my choice of research field that the problems became most urgent. My talents were necessary for the efforts to reduce the damage and predict where the problems would occur next. That was part of the difficulty: the problems arose at random, all around the entire Universe, often in multiple places at once, and there seemed no pattern. It was as if it was inevitably going to happen everywhere in the Universe sooner or later, and once it happened in one world, the next world would be triggered, then the next, until we were overrun, like the outbreak of some great plague.”

“Initially, though,” said Abaasy, “The problem began with a search for a God.”

* * *

“An entity is said to be a God when the difference between the entity and the one observing them is so vast that existence on the same scale of reference cannot be imagined, over any length of time, no matter how great an effort is made. In other words, when that entity is judged to be limitless and impossible within the laws of reality. The observer decides that the only way to even touch them, to be close to them, is to somehow break the laws of the Universe, and this usually becomes the most urgent thing for their entire civilisation,” said Abaasy, “And this is what happened first. The entity in question was not a dragon but one of the dimensionally higher beings that we knew the existence of, that occasionally contacted us. Somehow, a being from the mundane realm had managed to contact them. We had not been aware that they possessed such an advanced level of technology. We believe an already existing point of convergence between the dimensions and a series of more subtle communications with higher dimensions had led the sudden technological revolution. This in itself was something of interest to us, something we believed we should watch closely. However, after the initial contact, the mortals almost immediately found a way to trap the higher being in the lesser dimensional state. At first this was accidental and caused a great deal of damage to their world but we believe it became deliberate after a while. They believed they had harnessed the power of God, had even become Gods themselves.”

“If a being higher than a dragon was in danger, we were in greater danger. The world of the species responsible had been destroyed but they had managed to escape on a spacecraft of some sort, then seed another world, creating the exact same problem on the new world. All dragons in contact with that world were immediately evacuated, that world sealed off from our travel routes, but this was not the end of the problems. Similar incidents began to occur in another nearby world, resulting in the conditions of their entire space-time continuum being reset to their initial state, several times, often on purpose. It was later revealed they had also collapsed the barrier between the observed and the observer for their consensus reality, again, in a mistaken belief that this was a God and they were elevating themselves to its level.”

“After thousands of years of careful observation and research, often under existential conditions very dangerous to a dragon, we still could not determine what it was that spurred these developments, other than certain races such as humans and Homs were prone to sudden hyperbolic technological expansions due to their own intelligence and persistence. Our best theory was that the affected worlds were seeding each other or that the initial race still existed in some form and had developed free dimensional travel, repeating the same experiment over and over again, with varying but still unsuccessful results. However, we did determine a certain pattern in the way that the phenomenon was spreading. This enabled us to determine the most probably location of the next affected systems. One of them was the closed-off world of the Bionis and the Mechonis. I was one of a small team elected to investigate the situation on that world.” 

“And that's how you came to be here,” said Marcus, “So you found out the situation, saw that we really were in trouble...”

* * *

Marcus knew the rest of that story. It had been on the day that was considered the last day of the giants as a civilisation. He had been surrounded by Arachnos, the terrible white spiders, hundreds of them swarming up the sides of the cliffs. Their colossal Queens, towering over his head, led their armies. He knew he could match one in battle, maybe his entire company could take ten or so but he lost count of how many giant fanged heads he spotted in the massed army, their eyes glistening with primal cunning and alien savagery. He and his handful of elite guard, the Gloria Slobos sect, had been left to defend the temple on Three Sage Peak, to guard their most sacred relics with his life. Most of the other tribes were dead, the rest in battle right now at the other temples they had fallen back to, most probably losing. They were outnumbered, the spiders were too cunning hunters, they bred too quickly and he swore their queens were getting larger. The last of the Gogols had already been driven into the depths of Tephra Caves, desperately preserving their own shrine, while nobody had heard from the Orlugas for a long time. There was no negotiating with them. Maybe the giants should have found some way to communicate with them but as far as they could tell, the spiders had no thoughts, no motives in life other than overrunning and devouring everything, laying more eggs and moving on. We should have spotted the threat sooner, Marcus thought, should have seen the warning signs of how fast they were spreading and how easily they were conquering other races that had once been rivals to the giant races. Maybe we should even have agreed to fight alongside them to drive back the spiders before it became an impossible task. The children of the giants had been arrogant. They had always assumed they were, and would always be, the dominant race of the Bionis. They hadn't even stopped to wonder why they thought they had a chance against the race whose ancestors had exterminated the True Giants.

He was surrounded by their corpses when night fell early, when the dark infernal shape blotted out the sky. It had already become difficult to see, his eyesight clouded from battle rage and creeping exhaustion, his fur matted with green ichor, crouched behind a mass of corpses where the spiders had climbed over their fallen Queen in a suicidal frenzy to reach the hated enemy. They were still coming from every direction, pouring into any gap in the morbid barricades he had constructed. He could no longer hear his allies above the terrible droning buzz that the spiders made when they were ready for war. He knew he couldn't move from the spot he was standing, that soon he wouldn't be able to move his limbs at all, simply due to lack of room. He felt his left foot slip backwards, on what he couldn't tell, he doubted it was anything pleasant. Then the darkness fell and he assumed it was the end. Maybe if he carried on fighting just a little longer, he could try and make some difference before he fell...

Then the terrible roar sounded, the shadow moved in the rhythm of truly gigantic wingbeats, the size of something that was alive during the creation of the Bionis. It smelled of ozone, of something that hadn't existed in the world for very long. A demon, Marcus had assumed, his mind ragged from the ordeal of battle, a demon from the Abyss, brought here by war.

It walked over to him on four sturdy legs that ended in spiked feet, like one of the primordial lizards that still existed in Makna Forest. It looked far better adapted to flight than moving on land but Marcus doubted that there was anything it was unsuited to, to the point that it was incapable. Its burning eyes, windows into a thousand other worlds, locked him firmly in their gaze. He had fallen over, he realised, and it was standing over him. The spiders were gone. He could hear the moans and hissing screechs of the wounded giants and spiders respectively, few gasps of muted terror that were probably giants rightly too terrified to move. The battle was over, though.

“Pardon me, but I am a traveller and a stranger here, and I know nothing of your world,” said the voice in his head, formal out of habit rather than any kind of deference, “Could you tell me its name?”

* * *

“... I am still not sure of the exact situation here on the Bionis but I have become absolutely convinced it is somehow related to the other incidents. I will probably not be able to solve the overall problem but I will be able to understand it better. I am not even sure if I can save this world, to be honest, but I believe I have the power to evacuate every Unique on the Bionis and the Mechonis. However,” he said, “This will not be possible if anyone, at any point, acts as though I were a God and interferes with my plans or the fate of this world as though I was. At that point, they will be hastening their own destruction. This world is very unstable already. It will not survive much more interference. As for my own plans, the raw forces that will be required for an undertaking of that magnitude, to create a portal large enough to transport that many people all the way to another viable world, will be difficult enough to control on its own. If anyone were to tamper with it, if anyone were to deliberately try and break it...”

“I understand,” said Marcus, “I will try and let people know that you have forbidden religious worship of yourself. I presume you do not want anyone else in the Order to know of anything else that we spoke of today,” Abaasy nodded to confirm that this was the case.

“One day I will tell more people. I need to know which people I can safely tell, who I know will survive such knowledge, who will not react like the ones who always begin this trouble on every world. That is one of the reasons why I recruit so many different types of Uniques. When I am eventually forced to leave this world, for whatever reason, I will probably continue on other worlds.”

“I am deeply honoured that you consider me your first choice. I realise I am by no means the strongest Unique... some do not even consider me a Sage...”

“Raw power is not the only factor in the equation. Martial strength in particular is useless to me in this particular task,” he said, “You seem to show the most understanding when I teach you new things.”

“I have one more question...”

“What is it?”

“Does anything exist in the wider Universe that actually... well...”

“That I would classify as a genuine, legitimate God? Nothing that we can definitively prove. However, we do not know everything that exists in the Universe. There are dimensions beyond anything reachable even by dragons.”

“Do any of you believe in such a deity?”

“Some of us do. We are not averse to faith, to the belief in things beyond our immediate understanding. It would be equally foolish to assume that such a thing doesn't exist, and the use of of such faith as inspiration and guidance is an extremely practical application. If someone claims to communicate with deities during deeply personal experiences, even if there is no evidence, we cannot rule out the possibility that they have made contact with worlds we don't have any way to test the existence of yet.” 

“And yourself? Do you believe? If that is not too personal a question.”

The dragon paused. Marcus sensed something he rarely ever witnessed; the dragon was genuinely having difficulty answering the question.

“I have never really given it that much thought. I have more immediate problems to deal with,” he said, swinging his head, “And my goal here has been achieved, so I must attend to my next most urgent problem. This meeting is over.”

Marcus watched the dragon ascend into the pure white sky. A blizzard had begun. This was nothing to do with Abaasy; Valak Mountain's weather was quite capable of being treacherous, merciless, homicidal and fabulously beautiful all on its own.

* * *

The meeting with Marcus was over but Abaasy's work was not. He was confident that Final Marcus understood the importance of Abaasy's latest instructions, he had always been the most intelligent Sage and he usually followed orders. He knew that the next individual he had an appointment with did not consider the dragon to have any authority, did not agree with his point of view and would not be so easy to negotiate with. He hadn't been in that situation for a long time now, not since the last time Shulk and his party tried to attack him. He had allowed them to retreat on that day – he wasn't sure if it was possible to kill Shulk, what with the incredible amount of space-time distortion and fate alteration that happened around him, and the human was almost certainly involved in something that would have apocalyptic consequences if Abaasy changed its course by removing essential components without knowing exactly what he was doing. From the rate that their power was growing and the savagery with which they attacked other Uniques, the most likely outcome of his sparing their lives was that they would eventually return, they would have the power to actually harm him this time, they might even be able to destroy him. Shulk was the most dangerous threat on the planet so far. One day, he may have to fight Shulk and even kill him, if only to save his own life. However, at least Abaasy knew for certain that he could not ask Shulk to co-operate with him. Shulk was busy in his own role, fighting his own battle, one that would eventually stop this world from being destroyed altogether. It was the thought that there were others out there who were deliberately trying to sabotage his plans, people who should know better, people he would not be able to avoid trying to negotiate with.

After all, he did not want his mission to be remembered as the most disastrous failure, the horror story told to new recruits, the grave example of the worst possible consequences of lack of discipline. So far away from home, with wildly varying opinions and no clear hierarchy, and now separated... the mission where none returned, each slain by the hand of another.

He hadn't told Marcus anything about the other members of his expedition party, he realised. The topic simply hadn't come up, and he had more urgent matters to convey. Maybe it was something that the others needed to have explained to them at some point, in case they became involved unwittingly. He would rather nobody else become involved but, as usual, the other two did not share his sentiments. So far, the self-styled 'Demon King Dragonia' had attacked a colony of refugees just as they were almost about to restore their settlement to a full, thriving community. His batch-mate 'Dragon King Alcar' had even sided with the forces that they had determined were malign, and was plotting to assassinate Shulk. Both of them were deliberately disobeying their original directive, in that they allowed their allies to worship them as deities, even encouraging the false belief that they were the only existing dragons, so that they would command immediate and unquestioning obedience from their allies. Abaasy could not determine the exact moment when they had strayed so far from their mission. He knew they hadn't simply been corrupted – they both had their reasons, Alcar believing that the world needed to be completely destroyed by a third party before the phenomenon could spread, Dragonia believing that the natives of the world were too weak, even the Uniques, to avoid being corrupted, and the only way to prevent the corruption was to slay every last inhabitant and replace them as the ones destined to save the world. Abaasy could understand why his partners would come to such a conclusion, drastic and needlessly destructive as their methodology was. They were weaker than himself – they had already met Shulk in battle, in separate incidents, and had been badly wounded to the point that they were forced to flee and hide. They believed that the mission had been doomed from the start, that they were losing, that they were running out of time. These two factors did not necessarily go hand in hand – Marcus was the weakest Unique and yet he was the one who Abaasy trusted to actually piece together what was happening – but, like many dragons, Dragonia and Alcar could not react sensibly to a situation where they didn't clearly have the upper hand. Abaasy understood now that they had been totally unsuitable for the mission in the first place.

That was why it was so important for him not to make the same mistake again.

Alcar would be holed up in the Basverg Belfry, high in the towers of the Cathedral on Prison Isle, probably still licking his wounds. As far as he was concerned, that was his home. Abaasy wasn't sure where exactly Dragonia lived but he was sure he could lure the other dragon out again, hopefully without endangering an entire town. He just hoped he could talk some sense into them before they did anything else too stupid. He would start with the one he actually knew the location of, and who was also the weakest, therefore the easiest to deal with if the conflict escalated beyond harsh words.

The grey, twisted spire came into view. Avalanche Abaasy dipped his wings and descended into the mist.


End file.
